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Assessing Young Children with Deaf-Blindness
blind because ‘‘passing’’ many items requires intact
sensory capacities. The presence of multiple
disabling conditions typical of the vast majority of
children in this ‘‘low-incidence’’ group (Chen, 1999)
renders these tools even less appropriate. Additionally,
relatively few evaluators have had training or
direct experience working with young children who
are deaf-blind. As a consequence of these and other
factors, assessments of children who are deaf-blind
often result in the identification of weaknesses rather
than strengths (Rowland, 2005) and yield little
information relevant for educational planning.
The field of early childhood special education has
established recommended practices for assessing
young children with disabilities (Division for Early
Childhood, 2007; Neisworth & Bagnato, 2005) that
underscore the most important assumptions underlying
effective assessment of this population (Chen,
Rowland, Stillman, & Mar, 2009). First, understanding
a child’s communication behaviors is prerequisite
to gaining insight about his or her learning style,
aptitudes, social competence, and concept knowledge.
Many children who are deaf-blind use
expressive communication forms other than speech,
including reactions (e.g., smiling, crying), directed
behaviors (e.g., reaching), gestures, signs, vocalizations,
and picture and object symbols (Mar & Sall,
1999a; Rowland & Schweigert, 2000, 2004). The
evaluator must become familiar with the ways in
which a child comprehends and signals to others, not
only to assess the child’s communicative competence
but also to gain an understanding of his or her
interests, knowledge, and needs. Second, assessment
approaches and instruments must consider the
impact of sensory impairments on concept acquisition
and the unique ways in which these children
acquire information from the environment. Children
with vision and hearing impairments may learn about
everyday objects and spaces primarily through their
tactile, kinesthetic, and/or olfactory properties, in
addition to (or instead of) their auditory and visual
properties. Concepts like size, for example, might be
acquired by the positioning of the arms and hands
during manipulation of objects of different sizes,
instead of the objects’ visual characteristics. Concepts
such as number, shape, direction, speed,
height, volume, position, and color may be extrapolated
from the child’s everyday hands-on experiences,
rather than pictures, diagrams, or verbal
descriptions (Rowland & Schweigert, 2001). Third,
unlike traditional assessment, in which children are
presented formal tasks in isolated settings, assessment
of children who are deaf-blind must occur and
be referenced to skills and behaviors in typical
contexts, such as the learning and social activities
that occur in classrooms, homes, and communities
(Chen et al., 2009). Measures such as age
equivalents, percentile rankings, and standard scores
are valid only if the child with deaf-blindness has had
the same learning opportunities as the children on
whom the instrument has been normed (e.g.,
typically developing peers).
Despite the shortcomings of the most common
standardized instruments, many assessment tools—
both those designed for use with typical and lowincidence
populations—can potentially be used to
assess the communication, learning, and cognitive
abilities of young children who are deaf-blind.
However, there has been no systematic effort to
examine what instruments are being used in current
practice, how widely they are used, and to what
extent these tools are consistent with recommended
early childhood practices. This study, conducted in
conjunction with a research grant funded by the U.S.
Department of Education, sought to examine current
practices in the assessment of cognitive, communication,
and learning skills of young children who are
deaf-blind. Its purposes were to (a) examine the tools
used by professionals to assess young children (2 to
8 years of age) who are deaf-blind and who have
additional disabilities; (b) evaluate promising tools in
terms of the constructs of appropriateness, applicability,
accuracy, and usability; and (c) investigate the
role that assessment plays in individualized education
plan (IEP) and individualized family service plan
(IFSP) development. Other data from this project,
including perspectives of experts, family members,
and family specialists, are reported in Chen and
colleagues (2009) and clinical suggestions are provided
in Rowland (2009). Complete data on the 5-year project
may be found at http://www.ohsu.edu/oidd/d2l/com_pro/
DeafblindAssessmentDataSummary.pdf
Method
64 | AER Journal:Research and Practice in Visual Impairment and Blindness
Participants
A total of 135 professionals from 24 states,
recruited with the help of the National Family
Association of Deaf-Blind and the state deaf-blind